Linked List: December 6, 2022

Tuesday, 6 December 2022

Tim Cook Says Apple Will Use TSMC Chips Fabbed in Arizona ★

Kif Leswing, reporting for CNBC:

“And now, thanks to the hard work of so many people, these chips can be proudly stamped Made in America,” Cook said. “This is an incredibly significant moment.”

The chip factories will be owned and operated by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the biggest foundry company with over half of the global market share. TSMC produces the most advanced processors, including the chips in the latest iPhones, iPads and Macs.

The plants will be capable of manufacturing the 4-nanometer and 3-nanometer chips that are used for advanced processors such as Apple’s A-series and M-series and Nvidia’s graphics processors.

Hard to overstate how important it will be if TSMC starts turning out world-class chips from Arizona. For Apple, yes, but more so for the world, overall, to get leading-edge fabrication out from under the thumb of China.

Tim Cook, on Twitter:

Apple silicon unlocks a new level of performance for our users. And soon, many of these chips can be stamped “Made in America.” The opening of TSMC’s plant in Arizona marks a new era of advanced manufacturing in the U.S. — and we are proud to become the site’s largest customer.

Wired: ‘Tony Fadell Is Trying to Build the iPod of Crypto’ ★

The incomparable Steven Levy, writing for Wired:

One of his dreams was to extend the screen along the edge of the unit, so people could label it. None of the E Ink displays he saw could do what he wanted, so he contacted an old friend, the UK venture capitalist Hermann Hauser, who had once been involved in an unsuccessful ebook device with advanced E Ink. That company, Plastic Logic, was now based in Dresden, Germany, and was making custom E Ink displays. And they could bend! The curved display had at that point been used only by an obscure Russian phone called the YotaPhone. Fadell wanted to produce hundreds of thousands of screens with a dramatically sharper curve and at a low cost.

I will say, the Stax looks cool.

After breakfasting at the bistro, I spent an hour with him trying to get set up to trade crypto and buy NFTs. While getting the wallet to authenticate me was easy, getting the currency needed to buy the funky artworks Rogers likes proved frustratingly difficult, and apparently impossible to complete in the time we had. “Crypto is where the internet was in 1993,” he finally said, in a tone somewhere between wistful and pissed off. That doesn’t bother him too much — the iPod, after all, came out in the early, awkward days of digital music and took a few years to catch on. “The only question in my brain is, are we the Apple of Web3?” Rogers says. “Or are we the BlackBerry or Nokia of Web3?”

I’m unconvinced there will be an Apple of Web3.

CNBC: ‘Warner Bros Discovery Close to Picking “Max” for Name of HBO Max Replacement’ ★

Alex Sherman and Lillian Rizzo, reporting for CNBC:

Warner Bros. Discovery executives are close to formalizing a new name and platform for its soon-to-be-launched streaming service that will combine the preexisting HBO Max and Discovery+ services.

The merged platform’s expected name, “Max,” is being vetted by the company’s lawyers, according to people familiar with the matter.

Executives haven’t finalized a decision and the name could still be changed, but Max is the likely choice, said the people, who asked not to be named because the discussions are private. Some senior executives are still debating a final name, said two of the people. Internally, Warner Bros. Discovery has given the new service a code name of “BEAM” while a final name is being debated, said the people. Lawyers are vetting other names, as well.

Not the worst name they could go with. The mistake with “HBO Max” was muddying the premium HBO brand with the “anything and everything” content of a unified app for everything this enormous content factory conglomerate puts online. My big question is what happens to HBO content. Is it stuck in a tab inside the “Max” app, or will there be a standalone “HBO” app too?

Update: Worth mentioning that Disney handles this branding issue pretty well inside its Disney+ app, with permanent banners for major sub-brands like Pixar and Star Wars.

Apple Adds 700 New Price Points to App Store ★

Apple Newsroom:

Under the updated App Store pricing system, all developers will have the ability to select from 900 price points, which is nearly 10 times the number of price points previously available for most apps. This includes 600 new price points to choose from, with an additional 100 higher price points available upon request. To provide developers around the world with even more flexibility, price points — which will start as low as $0.29 and, upon request, go up to $10,000 — will offer an enhanced selection of price points, increasing incrementally across price ranges (for example, every $0.10 up to $10; every $0.50 between $10 and $50; etc.). See the table below for details.

One change is that prices can simply end in .00 now — $5 even, say, instead of $4.99. But developers can also go with $4.95 now.

Anyway, this surely ends any and all controversies surrounding Apple’s stewardship of the App Store. More price points, yeah, that’s the ticket.